Mary’s Divine Maternity and Immaculate Conception ! ! !

I must admit, when I took on the task of authoring a blog about The One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church and the Truth that She is, and contains, I never thought it would be so challenging. Their is so much I could write, actually type about these topics, but in order to keep viewer/reader attention I have to limit myself to certain “snippets” if you will about these topics. So please forgive me if any feel that I miss certain areas of a topic that I may just touch on or miss altogether. Like I have stated before, this is only a beginning of what I hope will be a lead to a more advanced catechetical blog. However, please, as always, feel free to comment or ask questions on any topics related to Church teaching.

St Bonaventure states very clearly, ” God could make a greater world, but he cannot make a more perfect mother than the Mother of God.” Everything that we attribute to Mary including Her, Immaculate Conception, Assumption, Co-Redemptrix… all flows if you will from the fact of Marys Divine Maternity, that She is the Mother of the Second Person of the Trinity. As Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange said in his book “Mother of the Saviour and Our Interior Life,” the divine maternity, considered in isolation from Mary’s other dignities, is the end and reason of her fullness of grace, and is therefore higher than it is. The anticipated fact of the Divine Maternity of Marywas the reason for Her Immaculate Conceptionand kept her preserved from sin and any inclination to sin. Mary wasn’t in need of healing from a fallen nature. She did not have the stain of original sin , she was preserved from it, in anticipation of Christ’s death on the Cross of Calvary. If someone falls into a pit filled with mud and you send down a ladder, you could say that he or she was saved. However, in Mary’s case, she did not actually fall into the pit filled with mud, but before that happened, she was preserved from falling from the edge and caught before the actual fall. Would that also not be saving someone? Of course it would. I choose try and use common analogies in catechising the faith, many of the analogies are parroted from other sources, but can get the point across.

In the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 1 the Angel Gabriel most definitely implies Mary’s Immaculate Conceptionwhen he states “[28] And the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” The Greek translation of the salutation from Gabriel of “Hail full of grace” is “Chaire, Kecharitomene“. These two words imply something that does not always translate well into English. WhatKecharitomeneactually means is “fully graced.” Now fully graced means sometime in the past, like at Mary’s conception actually. This is a far cry from some of the absolutely terrible translations we even see in some Catholic translation of highly favoured. The translation is full of grace or fully graced when translated literally from the greek. This is a scriptural proof of Mary’s Immaculate Conception. In fact, all through Church history Mary’s Immaculate Conceptionhas always been taught and believed. It was solemnly defined of course in 1854 by Pope Pius IX and here it is:

Ineffabilis Deus

Apostolic Constitution issued by Pope Pius IX on December 8, 1854.

God Ineffable — whose ways are mercy and truth, whose will is omnipotence itself, and whose wisdom “reaches from end to end mightily, and orders all things sweetly” — having foreseen from all eternity the lamentable wretchedness of the entire human race which would result from the sin of Adam, decreed, by a plan hidden from the centuries, to complete the first work of his goodness by a mystery yet more wondrously sublime through the Incarnation of the Word. This he decreed in order that man who, contrary to the plan of Divine Mercy had been led into sin by the cunning malice of Satan, should not perish; and in order that what had been lost in the first Adam would be gloriously restored in the Second Adam. From the very beginning, and before time began, the eternal Father chose and prepared for his only-begotten Son a Mother in whom the Son of God would become incarnate and from whom, in the blessed fullness of time, he would be born into this world. Above all creatures did God so loved her that truly in her was the Father well pleased with singular delight. Therefore, far above all the angels and all the saints so wondrously did God endow her with the abundance of all heavenly gifts poured from the treasury of his divinity that this mother, ever absolutely free of all stain of sin, all fair and perfect, would possess that fullness of holy innocence and sanctity than which, under God, one cannot even imagine anything greater, and which, outside of God, no mind can succeed in comprehending fully.

Now this Infallible declaration from the Chair of Peter was not even close to a new teaching. This like I stated before is a very ancient teaching of the Church. The Lateran Council held in 649 calls Mary ” Immaculate ” (Denz, 256). St Augustines very well known comment, ” The honour of the Lord does not permit that the question of sin be raised in connection with the Blessed Virgin Mary.” Also the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary has been celebrated in the Church since the 7th and 8th centuries especially in the Greek Church. St Ephrem compares Mary and Eve, ” both were at first simple and innocent, but thereafter Eve became the cause of death and Mary cause of Life.” St Justin, St Iraneus and Tertullian all contrast Mary and Eve, as Mary cause of life and Eve cause of death. The Fathers have always held that Mary was indeed without spot!

So, is Mary the fulfillment and promise of the woman mentioned in Gen 3:15, ” [15] I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel. ” Yes, of course she is. She is” the woman,” the new Eve. Mary said a great big YES to God, Eve said no. We could go deep into studying Our Lady and we will. You will also notice that certain topics will cross over into one another when I am trying to teach about Mary. This is bound to happen , because they all work together into this most wonderful of Gods created, Mary.

May Almighty God bless us, and protect us from the world, the devil and ourselves. Seat of Wisdom, pray for us!!!

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In my 6th-grade class, the kids have already learned about the Ark of the Covenant which was reserved permanently for God’s Stuff. When we get to Mary, and they figure out she’s the New Ark, they have no trouble understanding the Immaculate Conception.

that is awesome, if we only had more true catechists, but thank God we have some that take the time to truly teach the children and use some imagination like you do to create the long lasting images that will help the children to grow in their faith as they get older. Do you ever talk about vocations at that age and ask them to consider that God may call them to the Priesthood or Religious Life one day?